If you read here often enough then you know I address this topic from time to time as companies and people do cheat with their software. If you watch the markets you see folks like Nanex post charts every day giving out visuals on where the cheating is. Unfortunately the “honest” folks that are putting out information on where the cheating takes place don’t seem to get enough attention out there. On markets, look at old Mary Jo White for example. Anyone who writes code just rolled when we had the Congressional hearings on markets not being rigged. In case you missed that one, here’s a link from the archives…

It just seems the consumers (I’m in here too) are just never going to get any kind of a break. Excess Scoring is around everywhere and particularly in healthcare to where it’s out of control. I’m sure like me you read some “goofy” study that is pretty spurious on what is being correlated together and what do you know, next month some company is using it to score you as it’s called a “study”. If this is going to persist, we need better studies published as companies again determine that they have some form of contextual accuracy when they don’t.

In the last couple of days, yet another big blow for consumers with the newest executive order that says “the government knows what’s best for you”, which I tend not to agree with most of the time. This is really bad as it’s giving data sellers a license to go hog wild. In the health care area, many get around selling your actual data and will sell one of their proprietary formula scores about you. This helps them get around HIPAA and it gets used in some risk assessment or resold again. Here’s the first two paragraphs of the Obama Executive Order on Behavior Science Insights and it’s certainly more than enough to make your hair stand on end.

I have said many times in all the White House meetings on privacy, not once could they mutter the words “data sellers” at all. White House would always dance around it and followed the same old failed routine of having lawyers write verbiage that any old coder could work right around the interpretation. It happens the time. I think also they made up this name: “ behavioral science insights” and I almost expect them to begin calling health insurance a science pretty soon. Actually a couple years ago I wrote a post to that effect as well.

“A growing body of evidence demonstrates that behavioral science insights -- research findings from fields such as behavioral economics and psychology about how people make decisions and act on them -- can be used to design government policies to better serve the American people.

Where Federal policies have been designed to reflect behavioral science insights, they have substantially improved outcomes for the individuals, families, communities, and businesses those policies serve. For example, automatic enrollment and automatic escalation in retirement savings plans have made it easier to save for the future, and have helped Americans accumulate billions of dollars in additional retirement savings. Similarly, streamlining the application process for Federal financial aid has made college more financially accessible for millions of students.”

Added to this we all know that United Healthcare has big stakes in Behavioral Health with ownership of many subsidiaries in that business. Actually the company has a subsidiary just about in the Silicon Valley in California that other companies like Kaiser, who was fined for lack of behavioral health services contracts with for one example. United through their former Ingenix subsidiary, now called Optum Insights has been pushing this for years with extreme “scoring” of patients and finding risks and reasons to deny payment in some areas. Right now the company is being sued over some of this.

A few years ago it was Ingenix (who’s CEO was Andy Slavitt who’s currently running Medicare) that brought in this obscure metric system of predicting and scoring people on who they “think” would take their medications. Keep in mind this is all proprietary and prescription records when not obtained from a HIPAA complaint entity are open game to be “scored” and sold.

If you move forward with this a few years, you can see today how bad the metrics and data are and if you pay cash, the software pharmacists are required to use for follow up, you get “scored” as an Outlier if there’s not enough data. In other words, you get one star if the metrics can’t fulfill the query so there you go, flawed scoring. Again I don’t know what’ wrong with the White House and this case of Stat Rat Fever they have, but this is flat scoring people with metrics that have nothing to do with taking medications. If you are male, you get a ding, if you have kids at home, another ding as they might distract you. Again this is the insanity being promoted by the White House.

There’s a lot of Excess Scoring going on with doctors. I’ve heard some stories directly on that on how it happens. The truth of the matter here is that again, doctors are algorithmically scored and dropped from network. Cost is the item here, not how good the doctor is by all means. Some doctors have tried to negotiate to be back in networks so they are not having to drop patients, but with United, there’s no discussion, algorithms says you are gone. Again we come back to Andy Slavitt running CMS as this is what he did with math business models at United Healthcare, he’s an Algo Man and a one time Goldman banker.

Seriously I thought when I read the so called “Behavior Sciences Insights” Executive Order, it really sounds like Mr. Slavitt wrote it for the President. You read enough of old United reports and studies and it sounds just like them. Here’s another one of his lawsuits just now setting from the Ingenix Algo Days.

So our President has give the OK for big business and banks to scrape and sell our data and they get to use the name behavioral science insights. Behavior belongs in the area of psychiatry or neurology but we have all these amateur data scientists with lots of spurious correlations that will twist and spin their formulas into being in this category. I have seen apps that come out and use some ancient NIH study and use a dated study that’s no longer relevant as the science for their app and this it totally wrong. We end up with a huge problem in the use which I call Operation Perception Deception and you know I can’t hardly listen to the White House sit up there and belt out flawed numbers any more and based on all I see on the web, I’m not alone. We’re not stupid and we just shake our heads. This is not the first time that the White House dove into the area of what I call “junk science” as I saw in one of their emails on Climate Control, using numbers nobody could predict. It’s all about context and how much you can be convinced to believe, even when the information is erroneous and flawed.

I fully understand the precision and detail with genomic research and that’s not what this is about, this is rather about address the Junker so called data scientist that creates some spurious correlation with a number crunch and calls it “science” when it’s not. You read that crap in the news all the time and it’s so rampant that a Harvard Student created a site to exploit it called“The Spurious Correlations Site” where you can make your own and mock the ridiculous number crunch studies that are called science. I said a couple years ago, time to call foul on Proprietary Predictive Scoring Algorithms that can’t be replicated as it’s killing consumers to have gazillions of “scores” finding something wrong with you or having you at risk at almost every walk of life.

Time for a video break as this “game” promotion explains exactly what the new Executive Order from the White House is allowing..Open market on your personal data so they can study and try to predict your every move.

The full post on this is at the link below from a couple of years ago, explaining how this activity keeps inequality growing at an accelerated pace in the US. No other country runs as many algorithms and “scores” their consumers abusively like the US does. It’s all about money, $180 billion a year in round figures with selling personal data.

Here’s my somewhat passive campaign to get a law passed to index and license all data sellers as who in the hell are they? How do you find them when they are reporting flawed data about you when your data has been repackaged? You don’t and consumers live with flawed profiles they can’t fix and are denied access to something. This is what our President thinks is so great it appears.

This is why we are not “great” any more as consumers are absolutely pounded into the dirt with risk assessments (many of which don’t even apply to them) and other “scores” that are flawed. What a huge injustice and the really bad thing here is that flawed data gets the same price as good data. People and companies do cheat with code and math models. If you read the news today, VW blatantly cheated with their emissions software, folks it’s all cheating code. You have companies like Nanex that point out cheating code on the stock market every day as well, but does government do anything? No, instead we get this, more abuse with flawed data bought and sold and we don’t even know who’s doing it. Check this out below with credit cards…see how all your 100-200 line items on everything you charge is sold, MasterCard making gazillions doing this.

Our President just flat turned his back on US consumers with this order and again no wonder in the White House why they could never come to use the words “Data Sellers” in any of their privacy meetings. Again don’t be a Dupe of Hazard, be aware that companies do cheat with their computer code for profit and our President thinks this is ok.

How much confidence do you expect a person to have with all this excess scoring? Everywhere you turn, you have a risk for something, some risks you have never even heard of but some study shows that less than 1% is the risk and next thing you know the “junker data scientists” are modeling around it like it has statistical value when it does not with some really ridiculous correlations.

So the White House appears to be of the philosophy of keep fooling people from what I am reading. See the image to the left, Mark Twain. Sadly, Operation Perception-Deception is in full swing today and it starts right at the White House. I think Congress is too overwhelmed to even react or know what they should react to as well.

This President has turned his back on any dignity, privacy, etc. there is to offer to the common citizen. Is he that naïve or is this a plan to turn us all in to serfs that eventually will become convinced we are that flawed data model that’s being created? I think people will get mad and take some kind of action before that really happens. White House is definitely with this Executive Order pretty much just calling all of us the Dupes of Hazard.

So next week maybe we’ll have more “selfies” from the White House? That seems to be a great way to keep 5th graders distracted and maybe some adults too. As soon as those starting rolling out, I knew the administration had crossed over into virtual values and would probably never return to the real world.

Dark Arts of Mathemical Deception

Professor Charlie Siefe of NYU, a mathematician debunks clinical trials, and few other items to where data is spun and fools you, every day example, hear about the perfect butt algorithm and more. These are probably some things you have never thought about but again after listening to what he has to say, it’s time to think about being skeptical. Here’s a radio show that also talks about the same topics.

This video digs in a bit further with how fictitious business models are used by banks and companies do this too. The models are so complex that CEOs don’t even understand them. “Quants, The Alchemists of Wall Street will take you through how “math models” work at banks and financial institutions in a way that even the layman can understand. More videos like over at theAlgo Duping/Killer Algorithm Page. Bank of America will also tell you“IT’ is a business” how they make money.

Weapons of Math Destruction

This is a lecture where Kathy O’Neill, a former Quant who worked for a Hedge Fund (Weapons of Math Destruction) on Wall Street will tell you what is done with your retirement money and more. The banks and companies use technology to take advantage because they can. “Of course we are going to take advantage because our tools are our brains…if they could figure out a way to take advantage of pension funds they would, a good interview with explaining smart money and dumb money.

Algorithms Shape The World

This is a very good presentation done a TED Conference and really was the one that got everyone started thinking about algorithms and today it’s talked about a lot. As he says “if you’re an algorithm, life is looking pretty good, but can’t say the same for humans”. What is a black box? Nobody has any control over the flash crash. We have moved forward a bit but still we are writing the unreadable and lost the sense of some of what is happening. Nice plug for Nanex here with research.